A debris field the size of a moon drifted into reach of a quiet system — and every freelancer in the sector came running. The only war here is over who hauls out the most scrap before the others do.
Alpha Carinae was a forgotten system until, eighteen months ago, the Fall drifted into reach — an enormous, newly-workable debris field. Nobody knows what it actually is: an old fleet graveyard, a shattered megastructure, the leavings of a war long forgotten. What matters is that salvage law is clear — whoever’s still flying owns what they haul.
The boom hit overnight, friendly and lucrative. Salvage crews, repo contractors, parts fences and fixers filled the system, and for a season it was the best work in the sector. Then the easy salvage ran thin, the Authority got stricter, and the Syndicate started paying better money for dirtier strings.
Business is good. Lucrative, fast, professional, cutthroat.
Three powers hold Alpha Carinae together, barely. None of them is a flag — they are the people who hand you work, take their cut, and look the other way.
The freelancers’ own loose guild and hiring hall — mutual aid, shared charts, and a bar that doubles as a contract board. Not a government; a handshake that mostly holds. The closest thing to a side you’ll ever pick.
The Freeporters’ shadow — unlicensed salvage, off-book parts, and the contracts the Authority won’t stamp. Same trade, opposite side of a line everyone maintains and nobody respects.
The corporate-backed skin over the boom. Issues salvage rights, takes its cut, and pretends it’s in control. Under-resourced, over-stretched, bribable.
A few of the frames you’ll meet across the sector.
The third time each round you deal damage to the opponent's Hull, draw 1.
Create a Picket Drone.
Lives a day. Spends it well.
Your next Weapon System activation this round deals +1 damage. Look at the top 2 cards of your deck; reorder them.
Older than the war. Still keeping watch.
At the start of each round, if you control 4 or more Systems, generate 1 Shield.
A wall does not need to chase. The war comes to it.
The first time an opponent discards a card this round, look at the top card of your deck; you may put it on the bottom.
Everything that falls in, falls forever.
Something started showing up in the haul. Pieces from the Fall that return null where there should be readings. Mass that won’t settle. A clock that runs slow in one cargo bay. Pieces that match no human foundry — and someone made them anyway.
A few crews began chasing contracts to the cold edge of the exclusion zone, the part of the Fall everyone agrees not to talk about. Most came back fine. Aleksei Vor came back fine too. Now he sleeps with his eyes open, and talks about the Fall like it talks back.
The set ends not with answers but with a chill — the sense that the Fall came from somewhere, that somewhere is still out there, and that it may have noticed the lights coming toward it. The debt gets paid later.
Old hand, gallows humour. The voice in the log.
Cocky hotshot — fastest in the Fall, and says so.
Cold and patient. Chasing a person, not a wreck.
Charming, slippery, and into the Syndicate for more than she’ll say.
Took a Sable probe contract to the cold edge. Came back. Sleeps with his eyes open.
Factions come and go by the sector. The shipwrights are forever — and which badge is on your frame says more about you than any flag would. Establishment versus underdog, written in steel.
Matched, warrantied, expensive — the navy’s builder. Fly Halcyon and you look like you work for someone.
Cheap, ugly, hackable, beloved. Half the galaxy’s hot-rods are a Driftworks frame under stolen parts.
The military-industrial giant. Sells to every navy and every warlord — amoral, enormous, never funny about it.
The centuries-old gold standard. “Whose Plasma runs cleanest? Vance.” A Vance core outlives the ship around it.
Bleeding-edge and arrogant — beta-tests on its customers. Brilliant and recall-prone in equal measure.
“We move what others won’t.” Quiet, secretive, unsettling. Holds the exclusion-zone contracts — the thread that touches the hollow star.
For three centuries it was filed as a black hole. Then a survey found the impossible: a physical shell where there should only be a singularity — a star-shaped thing with nothing inside, returning null to every probe. Everyone calls it the hollow star now.
It sits behind an exclusion marking. Ships that ignore it malfunction; instruments lie; crews fade in and out of time. And it may be made of the only exotic matter in the galaxy — which would make it the one doorknob anyone has ever found on a locked room.
Every probe pointed at it comes back null. Not noise. Not error. Just nothing — as if the instrument never looked.
The ships that ignore the marking don’t come back.